New India Foundation Fellow Deepak Singh: On the Stateless Chakma Community

On Wednesday, April 14th New India Foundation Fellow Deepak Singh will give the latest lecture in the South Asian Studies Council Colloquia here at Yale. His talk, �Lost in Transitions: Stateless Chakmas in India�s Northeast� is an exploration the plight of the Chakma refugees of the Indian province Arunachal Pradesh. The talk synthesizes information from his book, The Chakmas between Bangladesh and India, which was released in November 2009.

Research for the book and the lecture was made possible by a 2004 fellowship from the New India Foundation, based in Bangalore. The foundation provides fellowships to promising scholars, working on book proposals on post-independence India. The foundation works to help fill the gap in knowledge on modern Indian history. Singh was one of the four first ever recipients of the fellowship.

Singh is the third New India Foundation Fellow to speak at the South Asian Studies Council Colloquia. In the spring of 2009 journalists Dinesh C. Sharma and Harish Damodaran both gave lectures. Sharma spoke on the growth of the Indian outsourcing industry, and Damodaran spoke on changing ethnic profiles of the Indian business class.

Singh is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Panjab University, where he has taught since 2000. He earned a Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A. and B.A. from Panjab before becoming an Associate Professor. He previously taught at Arunachal University, Itanagar. His broader research interests include the study of migration and refugees, politics and ethnicity in Northeast India and postcolonial politics of South Asia. In addition to teaching classes on South Asia, he covers topics of international relations, philosophy of resistance and Western political thought.

His talk here at Yale will discuss the historically denied identity of the Chakmas and their struggle for a political identity separate from that of being seen as a stateless people. The Chakmas have a legitimate claim to Indian citizenship, but their long exilic status has excluded them from civil and political rights. Singh will put the Chakma struggle into a broader context, and talk about minority ethnic communities, and state responses to stateless peoples and refugees.